There’s a scene early on in the new, breathlessly anticipated third season of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria where Sydney Sweeney’s sickly sweet Cassie and Alexa Demie’s razor-sharp Maddy reunite. Cassie is now a bored California housewife-to-be, dabbling in OnlyFans for extra money for her blowout wedding, and Maddy, a promising talent agent with a nose for spotting clients who can make her a killing. Cassie tells Maddy that if more people knew her, she could be huge. Maddy replies that Cassie might currently just be a big fish in a small pond. Cassie grins. “But, what if I was a big fish in a big pond?”
That is, broadly, the ambition of this next installment of the HBO behemoth. There’s a five-year time jump from the previous season—which dropped over four years ago, if you can believe it—and our beloved heroes, anti-heroes, and villains have all now been unleashed from the confines of high school.
They’re scattered across the West Coast: Zendaya’s Rue is on the nation’s southern border, doing drug runs in and out of Mexico alongside Chloe Cherry’s Faye, in an effort to pay her debts to terrifying kingpin Laurie (Martha Kelly). Meanwhile, Hunter Schafer’s Jules is a painter moonlighting as a sugar baby; Jacob Elordi’s Nate, an eager young developer engaged to Cassie; and Maude Apatow’s Lexi, a Hollywood assistant to a prolific showrunner (Sharon Stone).
This is a more sweeping, sprawling story told on a giant canvas, and, in a way, it makes perfect sense that Levinson chose to go in this direction. Euphoria has been a culture-shifting phenomenon since its debut back in 2019, and remains one of its network’s most-watched shows—so, why not expand its world and show us where these compelling characters end up?
Then, there’s also the matter of logistics: Euphoria was renewed for a third season in 2022, with production set to kick off the following year, but this timeline was disrupted by everything from the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes to substantial rewrites. At one point, it was put on hold and seemed at risk of being abandoned altogether. But then, Levinson appeared to have settled on a storyline that the studio was on board with (after a number of false starts), and had managed to bring this all-star, in-demand cast back together. How could he possibly pass up the opportunity to make another season, given its immense success? And with this time lost and his actors now in their late twenties, what else could he do but take them out of high school?
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